Walking in Waterloo Region

[plam]

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Which crossing do you think is missing?

I think that channeling is better, because then the car stops once instead of 5 times when people randomly cross. I also don't think that part of it is worse for people walking.

Removing the cars was discussed but ultimately it was too much of a stretch.

Crossings on the west side of Ring Rd. are a disaster.

Was removing cars discussed?  I was at the university at the time, and neither I nor my professors had any idea this was even happening, it seemed to occur unilaterally.  I have no idea why removing personal vehicles would be a "stretch", the ONLY parking lot on Ring Rd. itself is the administration building. They're trying to remove all buses which is much more of a stretch (vastly more people use buses).  But I'm pretty biased against the university administration.

As for channeling, it's probably not a lot worse for students, although, given that cars sometimes don't stop, it's not great--worse, students clearly want to walk on the other side because they end up walking on the road.

In any case it is clearly worse for cars and buses on Ring Rd.  Besides having many more stop signs on Ring Rd., before students generally filtered through traffic when there was a break, walking on one side till there was space to cross, then crossing, the result being nobody really had to stop at any time unless your destination was directly across.  Instead they now *must* cross at the crossing and thus very often block cars, and often for an extended period.

The west side wasn't even discussed in the channeling plan.

I was on the University's Joint Health and Safety Committee at the time (as was ijmorlan's brother). The internal report did discuss a range of options, up to banning cars. Lots HV, L, N, M, and R are on the Ring Road itself. But as I recall there were also concerns about deliveries etc. No private cars was also discussed. There were also discussions about enforcing the speed limit.

I also asked about buses. The University would like to maintain the current number of buses, not remove all buses. That may still not be the right thing, but it's a different thing.

I don't know if there are numbers proving the point, but I recall that the argument was that the crosswalks would make the cars more likely to stop. Which they really should. Filtering through traffic is probably not quite the right thing.